Wild Consort

Nestled in the greater Chicago area lies a small, creative studio where Blanca Robledo-Atwood, Bilingual Creative Director and Co-Founder of Wild Consort, Inc. develops all things web design - from concept to production.

In 2003, she started with bilingual advertising campaigns for the local Hispanic market. At the same time, the marketing and technology social media boom erupted, giving Blanca the opportunity to expand the company’s services to Wordpress web design themes and more.

Her focus has never been on designing a site that just looks nice, but to understand the client’s needs, study the target group, as well as their marketing objectives, so that the design is not only functional but smart. Wild Consort mostly nurtures startup companies and entrepreneurs by helping them market their brand to reach national levels. WIth their formula, they’ve proven their value by taking on these fresh, new businesses who at first have tried to save money by doing web development on their own, but reap much more success once Blanca and team work their marketing magic. One client’s customer base even tripled within a year!

We look at it as part of a marketing package - to be in sync and work together. So we also put together ideas, other marketing materials, like posters, flyers or any other communication.

Dodging Bullets

Blanca first heard about Sucuri a few years ago at a WordCamp in Chicago. Some of the people who ran the workshop also mentioned Sucuri. Though she wasn’t into doing web security for her clients, she did want to have someone to recommend. Sure enough, a client’s website was hacked and suspended from infection and she sent them to Sucuri.

A lot of these small organizations think by not hiring the regular maintenance on their website they’re saving money and are safe. But the way the internet is today there is no bulletproof.

That statement held to be true with a certain non-profit organization she worked with, who initially had their website hosted with somebody else. They didn’t have regular maintenance. From the front end to the back end it was very chaotic due to lack of attention. When they hired Wild Consort, they wanted them to redesign it only and move it to a reputable host, nothing more. But before they could get that far, the website was hacked. The url went to a porn site (a porn-redirect).

It was horrible. Here they were a non-profit organization with a board of directors and a lot of clients that applied for grants. They didn’t want them or the board going to a porn site. It was really bad.

Maintenance is Key

Blanca eventually managed to move them to SiteGround but three months later they got a notification from SiteGround that the website would be taken down because there was a warning of infection - a second hack. Blanca believes that the first hack wasn’t really cleaned properly and that the hackers used a backdoor code to get into the site. Without hesitation, she called Sucuri to set them up on the maintenance program.

Immediately she received up-to-date notifications and regular reports from Sucuri. Now, her client is a direct customer of Sucuri, and their site has remained clean.

The client didn’t realize how important it is to keep up maintenance, plugins, themes. He’s a nonprofit organization They had no idea of this kind of technology. He didn’t know what to do or where to start. Sucuri helped them get in order as it should’ve been in the beginning.

Blanca discovered that attacks can be random; they don’t have to be specific. At the start, she recalls recommending the hack alert plan with SiteGround for her client but they still got hacked. Even with security plugins added a hack can occur which is why maintenance is so important. With Sucuri’s complete website security, if a customer gets hacked more than once, they receive unlimited cleanups for free, which to Blanca is as valuable as having a company like Wild Consort bringing more to the table than just design.

I know about design. I’m the creative person. I customize websites, I talk to my clients, but I’m not an expert in security. I leave security for the experts.